Engineering Crystallography :

Improving the development and manufacture of new compounds

the fortyeighth international Course

Erice, 4 to 14 June 2015

Director: Kevin J. Roberts, Leeds

Purpose of the Course

The aim of this meeting will be to describe methods and experiments able to control the assembly of matter with sufficient certainty & precision to allow preparation of materials and molecular assemblies with far more sophisticated & tuneable properties & functions than are accessible in materials synthesised using current methods.
Put into a practical domain context, i.e. chemical engineering, this discipline quantitatively works well in two phases of matter, i.e. liquids and gases where thermodynamics and phase equilibria provide the enabling science. Thus, students can routinely design say a distillation process and equipment for any material feed and any product outflow. However, for solids one lacks this science base and the common capabilities are mostly qualitative. The paradigm shift is thus that crystallography applied within an engineering design framework will enable the development of a first principles approach for the manufacture of advanced pharmaceutical and fine chemical products. The challenge is thus to use crystallography and solid state chemistry as the base science and draw upon multiscale, multiphase, chemical-state sensitive techniques to deliver the enabling engineering science needed,